Jackson's comments, commiserations, confabulations and simplifications on identity management and Microsoft's Active Directory all based on his continuous "reality tour" of meetings with customers, ISVs and Microsoft.

Friday, April 18, 2008

ADAM - Active Directory Application Mode

Joe Richards had a couple of interesting posts about ADAM over at his blog.

"The MSFT DS Dev team needs our help. They need use cases for ADAM 2008 on Vista as well as future client OSes to push for an install that works on Vista and future client OSes. Apparently they want to do it and my response of "what are you kidding me, how come I can’t load it right now?" wasn’t good enough, they need help getting it justified and so if you have any use cases other than for developers… Let me know and I will pass it on."

The Microsoft DS Dev team? How about a Microsoft DS Product Manager telling the dev team to do it? Jeepers. Here's my rationale:

1. Make it as easy as possible for a developer to develop. Or, to put it another way: "What, are you kidding? I need a Windows Server to develop for ADAM?!"2. Make Active Directory viral by making it as easy as possible for someone to deploy it. Deploying ADAM on Vista is easy. Deploying ADAM on a server is more difficult. My main point is remove all possible blockers to deployment. Sure, the customer or developer may decide that Vista performance isn't spectacular but get them hooked and then let them upgrade. Or, to put it another way: "Wow, I can install ADAM and try it out without asking the bozos in the IT department for permission?"

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